Donald Trump has always inflated tentative agreements to deal status only for the American people to find out later that the deal doesn’t exist.
What has been negotiated with the Iranians is a memorandum of understanding that sets the terms for future negotiations.
There is no final deal.
The Trump administration will not release the text of the memorandum of understanding because, from initial reports, the Trump administration is giving Iran billions of dollars in exchange for the Iranians allowing Trump to surrender in a war that he started.
Vice President JD Vance was on CNBC’s Squawk Box, where he all but admitted that there is no final deal.
Vance said:
Well, I think the best outcome is a good deal for the American people, which we have. Fundamentally, we’re dealing with everybody in the Iranian system. You know, there’s the IRGC, the sort of regime hard liners, the military side, there’s the political leadership, and within the political leadership you have people who are more hard line and less hard line. We expect to have a full spectrum of representatives at the negotiation on Friday. Again, we’ve been talking to these people, sometimes indirectly, but sometimes directly, and that’s what’s fundamentally changed under the President’s leadership. We are now speaking directly to the Iranian system. We have some good relationships there. So, this is going to be a successful negotiation, because we’re not passing messages through various back channels anymore.
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We’re actually talking to them. And when you talk to them, you figure out what’s real, what’s fake, what are they serious about, what are they not serious about. And the thing I would add to that is we fundamentally have all the cards here. We don’t have to give the Iranians anything if they don’t make the commitments that we want long term on the nuclear program, and even if we just stopped here, what would be true? Their military is destroyed, the Straits of Hormuz are open, their nuclear program has been destroyed, and we have incredible economic leverage over them that we didn’t have a year and a half ago. So we’ve got a lot of leverage here, but we also have the President saying to them, we’re extending an open hand.
If you cut through Vance’s propaganda and talking points, the most important thing he said was what he didn’t say. The vice president gave no details, because there is no deal, but Congress wants to see what Trump has agreed to.